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Parkland Memorial Hospital Trauma Room No. 1, buried but not forgotten
A very significant piece of Parkland Memorial Hospital now resides in Lenexa, Kansas, just slightly south of Kansas City. Only, you will likely never again see this bit of Dallas history: The former Parkland trauma room has gone underground, in a storage facility controlled by the National Archives and Records Administration. It has been archived for a very good reason: It was in this trauma room — now known as Parkland Memorial Hospital Trauma Room No. 1 — that doctors tried to save the life of President John Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
But according to this morning’s Kansas City Star, folks won’t be able to view the operating room, which was moved from a storage facility in Fort Worth last September, for the foreseeable future: The National Archives will not allow people to take photos of the collection, nor did it allow the paper to even visit the material, which includes everything from the stretcher on which Kennedy was wheeled into the hospital to the clock that hung upon the trauma room’s wall. Notes the paper, “The materials are to be preserved, but they cannot be displayed, inspected or photographed.” Odd thing is: The room was actually in Parkland till the hospital was remodeled in 1971. –Robert Wilonsky
